Title: Cairo tools survey: a survey of tools applicable to the preparation of digital archives for ingest into a preservation repository

Pages: all
Date Released:21 May 2007

Summary of contents:
“The purpose of this tool review is to identify a set of ingest and metadatarelated applications, tools or code that could form the components of the overall Cairo tool package.”p5

This document contains an overview of 54 tools that the project has indentified that have functionality relevant to ingest of personal digital archives for curation and preservation.

Crtieria for inclusion on this list is:
“General criteria for the survey include applications and tools that:

are available now;

are available for public re-use;

may be open source, ‘free to use’ or commercially available;

extract or generate some form of metadata from or about a file object or

Title: Cairo use cases: a survey of user scenarios applicable to the Cairo ingest tool

Pages: all
Date Released: 21 May 2007

Summary of contents:
The CAIRO “project will develop a tool for ingesting complex collections of born-digital materials, with basic descriptive, preservation and relationship metadata, into a preservation repository.” The tool is designed to aggregate and interface with other tools and so reduce the computing skills overhead on archivists awnting to create AIPs. p3
“This document outlines a set of [55] use cases describing the different interactions users of the Cairo tool have with that tool. The use cases also describe the behaviour of the tool in response to those user interactions.”p5

Comments:
This document provides a selection of use cases that have shaped the developed of an ingest tool. As such they inform not only this tools but software/service development more generally and institutional preservation planning.

Brief project description:
“This project will develop a tool for ingesting complex collections of born-digital materials, with basic descriptive, preservation and relationship metadata, into a preservation repository. The proposal is based on needs identified by the JISC-funded Paradigm project and the Wellcome Library’s Digital Curation in Action project and is a key building block in our strategy to develop digital repository architectures which can support the development of digital collections. This tool will be tested on personal digital collections already accessioned by the partner institutions and will provide an open-source tool for use by others with similar requirements. The project will produce technical and user support documentation and promote the tool with relevant audiences. “